


Alas, the frailty is to blame

by jellyb34n



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Crossdressing, F/M, Fluff and Crack, Identity Swap, Roommates, Twelfth Night - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-12
Updated: 2020-08-12
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:47:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25853080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jellyb34n/pseuds/jellyb34n
Summary: Jaime is, he reminds himself regularly, Cersei.At least that’s who he’s meant to be for the final two years of her degree — his degree — at her women’s only college — his women’s only college — while she finishes studying at his men’s only uni — her men’s only uni.The plan had been simple. They switch. They’d done it all the time as children, and yes, things were a little more complicated now, but it would be a lark and they'd both get out from under Tywin's thumb. Cersei learns to deepen her voice and to bind her breasts and how to play footie passably, and Jaime learns makeup and how to pad his chest and tuck his cock.Besides these new (and sometimes thrilling, Jaime admits privately: he looks damn phenomenal in a good winged eyeliner and mascara, and in stilettos and the right skirt, the musculature of his legs and arse are accentuated rather magnificently) requirements for stealth and secrecy, things are meant to carry on apace.That is, until his roommate and the only person on campus who knows the truth gets herself expelled. Brienne Tarth becomes his roommate instead.Brienne Tarth is infuriating.A Twelfth Night AU. Of sorts.
Relationships: Jaime Lannister/Brienne of Tarth
Comments: 85
Kudos: 185
Collections: Jaime x Brienne Fic Exchange 2020





	Alas, the frailty is to blame

**Author's Note:**

  * For [earlwyn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/earlwyn/gifts).



> I wasn't able to deliver on the entirety of your prompt, but here are the (non-spoilery) bits I did (the rest in end notes)!  
> 
> 
>   * Twelfth Night AU
>   * fused with ~~boarding school~~ college roommates AU
>   * Extra bonus points if it's set around or earlier than 1940s/50s social norms (or whatever you picture Westeros to be like in a similar period).
>   * And bonus, you mentioned enjoying Britishisms, so I've chucked that element in too
> 

> 
> Also a note for those unfamiliar: at one point Jaime references a course called PPE, this stands for Philosophy, Politics and Economics.  
> Along similar lines, colleges can be within universities in this AU.
> 
> My very, very, very many thanks to my wonderful beta auntie_social for being so insightful and helpful, as always! And for holding my hand when I needed it. I feel so lucky to have you in my corner, thank you for everything you did, and do, and all the support you give ♥ And auntie_social is responsible for the final section of this fic existing, and the best bit to one of my favourite lines! Thanks, too, to C, M and P who don't go here but who heard about this nonetheless.  
> 
> 
> Title from Twelfth Night

Jaime is, he reminds himself regularly, Cersei.

At least that’s who he’s meant to be for the final two years of her degree — his degree — at her women’s only college — his women’s only college — while she finishes studying at his men’s only uni — her men’s only uni — where Cersei is Jaime and accomplishing his degree — her degree.

The plan had been simple. They switch. They’d done it all the time as children, and yes, things were a little more complicated now, but it would be a lark. And he would actually be able to study what he wants to study without their father breathing down his neck about _Responsibility to the Family Legacy_ , and Cersei would get to study what she wants to study, without their father saying, “I’ll indulge you until a suitable offer is made for your hand,” going on to then ignore her much of the rest of the time. Cersei wants Tywin’s attention, Jaime wants to be left alone, and so Jaime learns makeup and how to pad his chest and tuck his cock in case he might need it, and Cersei learns to deepen her voice and to bind her breasts and also how to play footie passably because Jaime had made a habit of that in his first year, much to Cersei’s indignation and Jaime’s amusement.

Besides these new (and sometimes thrilling, Jaime admits privately: he looks damn phenomenal in a good winged eyeliner and mascara, and in stilettos and the right skirt, the musculature of his legs and arse are accentuated rather magnificently) requirements for stealth and secrecy, things are meant to carry on apace.

What will happen in two years when they graduate? A problem for future-Jaime: present-Jaime mostly doesn’t think about it.

He had intended to spend his time with Taena — his roommate, Cersei’s former paramour and the only person on campus who knew the truth — take himself on long jaunts getting to know Storm’s End when she inevitably bored him, and elsewise keep his head down and get on with it. Now he isn’t forced into studying PPE, he rather likes his classes, and it isn’t so much a hardship as it is fun.

Only — Taena goes and gets herself expelled. And Brienne Tarth becomes his roommate.

Brienne Tarth is infuriating.

He’d known her, a little, before. She’s in his philosophy class — a course she shouldn’t be in, by rights, as it doesn’t fit her biology degree, but as in all things, Brienne had made a bull-headed bother of herself and the school had relented. He’d found her entertaining then, so righteous and easy to rile up. From safely across the room, he’d sometimes say things he didn’t even believe just to watch her turn puce in outrage.

Which had all been fine when she was a random classmate, rather different when she sleeps two feet away.

He calls her _chit_ to annoy her.

She says, “My name is Brienne Tarth,” to annoy him, he would say, except he suspects Brienne Tarth is rather too thick to operate that way.

Either way, he sighs, aggrieved, and says, “I heard you the first twenty-three times, chit,” and she pinches her lips into an impressively thin line, her face turns stony, and she generally seems rather more angry with him than the childish interactions warrant, he reckons. Jaime somehow feels not entirely like he wins those ones.

Then there’s an afternoon of discovery and drama which leaves him informed, but also annoyed and exhausted. In that afternoon, Jaime learns three things:

> **1\. Apparently Brienne Tarth hates him.  
>  ** 1a. Well. She hates Cersei. But he _is_ Cersei presently, so that particular niggle is more a distinction without a difference, in practical terms.
> 
> **2\. The true reason his sister had been keen to rebel against their father with this swapping identities charade, having previously been willing to toe his various lines. She had:  
>  ** 2a. lost someone their job (though that person was Ned Stark and Jaime couldn’t be arsed to spare much sorrow for that pompous old windbag)  
>  2b. lost someone their spot in the college (one Sansa Stark, Ned’s daughter, and someone Jaime knew vaguely, who certainly didn’t deserve to be caught in the web of his sister’s misguided machinations),  
>  2c. all this also failed to get their father the chancellorship at the college in Ned’s stead, presumably much to Tywin’s nose-flaring, teeth-grinding, single-eyebrow-raising, temperature-of-the-whole-godsdamned-room-lowering dissatisfaction,  
>  2d. All in what Jaime can only assume was a failed bid to impress their father. Which brings him back round to the top point #2.
> 
> **3\. And the third, final and most perturbing thing he learns:**  
>  3a. Exactly how brightly Brienne’s eyes shine when she speaks to a topic she feels confident in, and how loquaciously she can then speak to that topic, her voice doing interesting things like playing pleasantly against his ears even as she rants at him;  
>  3b. He rather likes to see it. Though perhaps less directly focused on him. It’s then that he begins to sit directly beside her in philosophy, just to catch that change in her eyes, and the way her blushes differ from one another.

It takes two weeks after that for him to find a way to bridge the gap between them. He can’t actually fault Brienne’s ire, much as he’d like to. But he’d seen her speaking with Renly Baratheon, who didn’t attend Storm’s End but made use of some specialized part of its libraries once a week, and Jaime had never seen anyone go so moon-eyed and tongue-tied than Brienne in that moment. And over _Renly. Baratheon_. of all people, someone so convinced of his own wit that he barely leaves air in the room for anyone to appreciate it — or not. Jaime nearly laughs at her, watching her struggle to string together a sentence longer than three words. Except then he’s struck by genius.

He offers to teach her to chat with men. She asks how that would work — and Jaime isn’t a foolish man, but for the briefest moment, he nearly says, “Obviously because you will be speaking with me, and I am a man.”

He doesn’t. Still somehow he manages to get her to say yes, and so with a begrudging Brienne who creates a schedule for them, and a mostly only amused Jaime who agrees to said schedule because he thinks it’s hilarious, they begin to have regular, time constrained chats in their own shared bedroom as though they don’t incidentally spend time together for the majority of every day and in which Jaime pretends to be a woman who is in turn pretending to be a man.

The difficulty begins when Jaime realizes Brienne never bores him. And that actually. He enjoys himself. 

It gets worse when it becomes obvious Brienne enjoys herself, too, because she starts ignoring the clock.

Then there’s a tricky morning involving makeup. Brienne watches him apply it; for a nauseating beat, Jaime thinks she's guessed he is him and not Cersei at all, and maybe inexplicably he feels a little relief someone else is in on it in amongst all the ears-ringing anxiety, but then he breathes again and it's clear Brienne is watching the way he passes his brushes through powders, outlines and fills his lips.

He offers to put some on her.

She agrees, shy and sweet, damn her, but then is difficult about it, damn her twice, and truly Jaime still does not know quite what happens, but somehow Brienne ends up on her back in his bed, Jaime straddling her hips and curling over her to dust her lids and paint her lips, and there’s a moment, up close, when her mismatched features make sense where they’re anchored by her eyes, and for a dizzying moment all he wants is to hover over her and count each one of her too-many freckles: a veritable flurry across her cheeks, her nose, gusting down her throat, her chest, vanishing under the neck of her top —

In any case, the makeup doesn’t work. He begrudges that it’s probably his fault, but it somehow looks like a lie on her face, a face made only for honesty. Jaime washes it off for her, he’s careful and gentle about it, and something about this makes Brienne tearful, and it breaks his heart, and he realizes he wants to soothe her, hold her close, kiss away the tears.

He doesn’t. Obviously.

What he _does_ do, is say, “There you are. Brienne Tarth,” when he’s done, and she looks at him strangely, and he’d heard it too, something in his voice that’s maybe a little like fondness, and his heart thumps once and he feels oddly exposed, and so he smirks, says, “It’s only your name. Don’t let it go to your head, chit,” and she scowls at him after rolling her eyes, then sticks her gently pink face back into a textbook, and Jaime forgets all about it.

That night, his pillow smells of the herbal shampoo she uses, and sleep is another thing he doesn’t do, neither does he actually forget her face in his hands, remembering her perfectly instead, and remembering, too, her body beneath him, and again imagining the holding and the kissing, maybe though without the possibility of tears, and.

And well.

_Bollocks_.

Isn’t that just a big fucking problem for him.

He resists that particular revelation for a while.

Only he becomes impatient, every afternoon, waiting for her return, wanting to hear about her day, and what she’d done in class even though he understands perhaps half of the words she uses but her voice gets a little brighter when she talks on science, and despite appearances, he’s only human. He also wants to hear about the sexist wankers in her course — making particular note of a certain Hyle Hunt for whom he now has definitive plans — and also to share with her some of what he’s learned in class, and also his thoughts on today’s lunch in the canteen, and how he misses his brother and his s-other brother, and he relishes her questions when they come, like it’s somehow a gift that she’s interested in him, and there are a fair number of them, the questions, but Jaime knows he'd accept scraps, also though he wants to know what _she_ thinks about lunch, about everything, including the weather and her godsdamned favourite colour — green, bizarrely, he tells her she ought to favour blue and she glares at him — and the few days they don’t see each other at all because she’s stuck in lab or he’s stuck in the library and one or the other of them is asleep by the time they come home, are the worst fucking days of the week and leave him irascible.

He likes her when _she’s_ irascible, and when she’s a mess because she’s just woken up and is the world’s slowest waker, and when she laughs, a bright bray she then tries to take back with a gasp and her hand covering her mouth, and when she scowls at him, and when she rolls her eyes at him, and when she goes shy in the middle of a sentence because she thinks she’s boring him and Jaime gets to reassure her that no, he really is interested and yes, he really does want her to go on, and she opens again, blossoming sometimes so slowly and sometimes within the blink of an eye, and fine, maybe he particularly likes her when she offers him that tremulous smile of hers, and fuck, fuck, this is a problem he’s got to do something about.

There remains only one avenue open to him.

Jaime flirts with her. As Cersei.

He recognizes it as incredibly ill-advised as it happens, but she moves through the world, so entirely and impossibly herself, and he wants... It's her fault, really. The downward tug of her broad mouth is just so inviting. The way her eyes sparkle, somehow annoyed about it beneath her frown when he manages to land a joke she actually likes, is near irresistible. And then there is her flush. It’s so — it is just so bloody awful, frankly, and yet he has never witnessed anything he so deeply wants to see, to cause, to find the source of, to learn how best to conjure again, again, again… and.

Brienne laid out, her hair a honeyed frenzy about her head, mussed once more against his pillow: she would flush differently, make sounds he hasn’t heard, the blue of her eyes nearly lost to the black of her pupils, and gods, _gods_ but he knows she would be glorious in fucking, slick with sweat beneath him, those long legs around his hips and moving with him, clutching at him, gasping his name and. And. And. _And_ that is an image he revisits often and cannot shake no matter how many times he takes it in hand.

_In hand_ being rather literal, the _it_ of the sentence being his cock.

So. As Cersei, he tosses his head and knows his hair tumbles over his shoulder temptingly. He bats his mascaraed lashes. He smiles coyly, suggestively, fondly. He makes allusions to liking her legs and her shoulders and her eyes and her smile.

But.

Mostly she doesn’t notice.

Worse, the one time she does clock a compliment, she flusters, then says, “You’re only being kind,” as though Cersei has _only been kind_ a day in her life, let alone Jaime in his. And since when does she trust Cersei to _only be kind?_

Regardless, Brienne is either so enamoured with Renly she is immune to anyone else’s attentions (inconceivable, frankly), no matter how attractive they are (and he is, very), or she is, obnoxiously, the straightest person he has ever met. Her lack of romantic or sexual interest in Cersei-as-impersonated-by-him is objectively a good thing, he knows, but he had one plan, insofar as it was a 'plan' and bad though it was, and with that scuppered, it leaves him somewhat up a creek.

Which, when he thinks on it later, might explain the day he finally blurts, “You ought to meet my brother, Jaime.”

“What?” Brienne asks, startled.

_What?!_ he asks himself, incensed.

Brienne flushes, Jaime stares as she hesitates, doesn’t know exactly what he wants her answer to be, but is also now determined to orchestrate a meeting even if she says —

“Why?”

_Yes,_ he snaps at himself: _Why?_

Jaime has no answer to this.

Once again, his mouth provides one without consulting his brain: “What good is only practicing with me? You’ll need experience speaking with a man, before you talk to Renly.”

He can see the desire to cover her face with her hands in the twitch of her fingers in her lap. He’s strangely proud when she resists.

Unbidden, he adds, “Once you do that, I’ll chat you up to Renly.”

_I will?_ he demands of himself.

“You will?” Brienne asks. Her eyes have gone large, her expression so hopeful it hurts.

Jaime says, “Yes. I’ll… speak with Renly.” _Who does not deserve you_. Though to be quite fair, he couldn’t name a single person who does, himself included.

She chews her lip, a slow crawl to insanity for Jaime as he watches and can do none of the exceedingly explicit things he wishes to, every time she does that. And finally, “Fine,” she says.

“Fine,” he mimics, automatically. Then puts on a tone, “ _Thank you, Cersei, you’re so generous._ ”

Brienne huffs. But she does glance at him with rather an earnest expression after that, and the deeply aggravating warm ache blooms in his chest, the one that got him into this mess in the first place, and so he only says helplessly, “How does Saturday suit you?” As if he doesn’t already know she never has any plans, because neither does he and so they’re both always here.

She nods, and bites her lip again. And he nods back, and definitely does not think about pulling the whole gigantic lot of her into his lap and kissing her and touching her until she writhes and gasps and lets him taste between her thighs.

“Brilliant,” he says.

“Brilliant,” she echoes faintly.

_Brilliant_ , he thinks to himself, sarcastically, on Saturday night, waiting for her now, having settled into a corner table at the pub. He had managed to duck her all day, pulling out his own clothes for the first time in weeks and letting his stubble grow out for the first time in too many godsdamned moons, and doing his best not to contemplate exactly how the evening might go.

Of course, sitting now, with nothing to do but watch the door, he’s flooded with possibility, top amongst them having his second shower of the day, only this one being entirely alcoholic. He’s worn the wrong shirt for that. The white will stain.

Gods, this is a disastrous idea. He’d only wanted a few minutes just him and Brienne — just _him_ , _Jaime_ with Brienne — but the risks are high, not just to Cersei but also. Their room would feel empty without her there. He should have kept his mouth shut and —

“Jaime?”

She’s here.

He doesn’t know how he missed her come in, with his eyes fixed on the door and with her as bloody large as she is. She’s exactly as she always is, only she’s more shy than he’s ever seen her, and she’s tried something new with her hair, his brave chit, it’s endearing, and over her blotchy rosy cheeks her eyes are wide and bright, and she gives an awkward little wave, flushes harder, and he remembers then.

This is Brienne.

_She_ is brilliant.

Of course.

And it’s a godsawful truth he can’t shake, but she’s worth every possibility of risk.

His heart turns over. He smiles. “Brienne. I’m Jaime.”

**Author's Note:**

> Then the other parts of the prompt I hit but which were spoilery:  
> 
> 
>   * Brienne and Cersei attend an ~~all-girls boarding school~~ all-women's college.
>   * Jaime and Cersei swap places - maybe the ~~boys' school has better university and~~ all-men's university has better political prospects Cersei wants, idk.
>   * Brienne knows of Cersei but either has never met her in person or has never spent enough time with her to recognize the disguised Jaime.
>   * General Twelfth Night shenanigans occur - Jaime likes Brienne, Brienne has a crush on someone else
>   * Extra extra bonus points if Cersei has had some queer relationships in the past
> 

> 
> A follow-up note regarding PPE: in the UK, many politicians, journalists, folx with access to influential platforms basically, graduated with degrees in PPE, and it's something Cersei would absolutely want to take, thinking it would set her on track to political power. Assuming the fictional university Cersei is attending is akin to the University of Oxford, in many ways, Cersei [isn't wrong](https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/feb/23/ppe-oxford-university-degree-that-rules-britain).  
> Also, a point of clarity, a la Oxbridge and others, colleges can be within universities here. So where Jaime's entire university is men-only, Brienne and Cersei's women-only college is within a university which recently progressed from men-only.
> 
> Also referring back to the top notes, the line I referred to is "Still somehow he manages to get her to say yes, and so with a begrudging Brienne who creates a schedule for them, and a mostly only amused Jaime who agrees to said schedule because he thinks it’s hilarious, they begin to have regular, time constrained chats in their own shared bedroom as though they don’t incidentally spend time together for the majority of every day, and in which Jaime pretends to be a woman who is in turn pretending to be a man," in large part because it's an absurd run-on describing an absurd situation, but it would have ended before the best bit if not for auntie_social "in which Jaime pretends to be a woman who is in turn pretending to be a man." ♥!
> 
> And I'm not sure how clear it is this is set in a hybrid 1930s/40s/50s-esque Britishized Westeros but the intention is there!
> 
> Hope you enjoyed ♥! Find me on tumblr @nossbean if that's your bag!


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